Why enlargement need not mean ‘jobs out, people in’

FOR many trade unionists in Europe, 1 May was rightly a joyous day. In Dublin, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern presented trade unionists from each accession country with a European ‘union’ membership card. Elsewhere, traditional May Day events featured Europe’s reunification.

Yet there is a darker side too, with many commentators prophesying that trade unions will be weakened by the accession of ten new states.

This fashionable argument runs that trade unionism and collective bargaining are relatively weak in most of the ten, along with welfare states and public services; that American style economic neo-liberalism is the dominant political creed with its emphasis on deregulation, privatization and anti-union entrepreneurship; and that the arrival in the EU of 70 million relatively inexpensive people will depress wages and social conditions in the fifteen states of the West.

It is true that this prospect is a worry to many trade unionists. On my travels around Europe, I have come up against fears that enlargement will mean “jobs out and people in”, causing already hard-pressed tax bases and welfare states, as well as collective agreements, to be weakened. These worries have been translated into restrictive transnational arrangements on the free movement of labour and/or on access to welfare benefits in just about all the EU-15.

In some of the new countries, these transitional arrangements have been taken badly, generating fears that the people of the new Europe are being treated in a second-class way, denied full access to full membership of the EU. I ask these countries not to exaggerate what are mostly very restrictive arrangements which, in any event, are temporary.

Overall, I take a much more relaxed and positive view. This is a moment to seize, not to shy away from: a key achievement of the EU has been that it has prompted its poorer economies to close the gap rapidly on the richer ones. This marvellous story can be repeated again in relation to the ten new countries, in which average growth rates are already well ahead of the ‘old’ EU-15.

Not only would this generate jobs and growth in the new countries, but it would increase trade and opportunities for the EU-15 as well. There will be winners and losers and, in the traditional EU way, the losers must be helped and not cast carelessly aside.

But overall Europe will gain immensely. And so can trade unions – whose response must not be protectionist. Seeking new borders around our economies will be ultimately futile.

Instead, we intend to be aggressive in building up ‘trade unionism’ in the new countries so that the benefits of growth are properly shared among populations as a whole and not just hoarded, Russian-style, by wealthy elites. Already, through our European Trade Union College, we are supporting new members’ trade unions to improve training of representatives to build social partnership and collective bargaining institutions, and to support welfare states.

For several years now, we have also promoted links between unions in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe to provide mutual help and have focused on border regions through our inter-regional committees.

We need now to go on and promote mutual recognition schemes whereby migrant workers become fully covered by union arrangements in the EU, and are not left to become workers in the black economy, marginalized and easily exploited.

Through the social dialogue process at EU level, we can also develop more European-wide standards that can underpin development in the new states.

It is probably too soon to speak, say, of a European minimum wage but it is certainly not too early to establish effective EU-wide procedural standards guaranteeing the right to organization and collective bargaining, social dialogue and social protection.

What we certainly do not need is an EU which aims to shut down its social dimension for fear of impeding its competitiveness.

We don’t need a new vice-president of the European Commission for competitiveness, whose response to social development would be to throw any proposals in the nearest rubbish bin. We need economic and social progress to advance together. That has been the old EU way. It should be the new EU way.

John Monks is secretary-general of the European Trade Union Confederation.

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